A Wii user from France, with some clever hacking and plenty of patience, turned his Wii into a Mac OS workstation. The user then posted a video that showed what the Wii-turned-Mac was capable of.
Following the ups and downs of the GameCube before it, the Wii was released in North America on November 19, 2006. It was Nintendo's best-selling home console for many years and outsold both the PS3 and the Xbox 360. The Wii was eventually dethroned by the Switch earlier this year, after a decade-long reign at the top of Nintendo sales figures. With over 100 million units sold and fans around the world, the Wii left a lasting impact on the public, not just Nintendo and gaming fans.
A French programmer by the name of Pierre Dandumont proved that the Wii was able to run Mac OS version 9.2, which predates modern Mac systems, and demonstrated how the system was installed on the console. He posted the process of hacking and programming his Wii in a video on his personal website and on YouTube, and showed some of the concessions that came with his attempts to run Mac OS on a 16-year-old console. Using the infamous Homebrew Channel on a hacked Wii console, Dandumont was able to use the channel's capabilities to run Linux, and in turn, run Mac OS 9.2 using Mac-On-Linux technology and an SD card with a Mac OS disk image. Despite being from 2000, the specs needed for Mac OS 9.2 are more than the 2006 console can handle.
When checking the system information within Mac OS 9.2, the Wii console had only 52 MB of RAM available, which falls just short of the memory specs needed to run Mac OS 9.2 or its successor, Mac OS X Cheetah, with any sort of efficiency. Dandumont showed the sluggishness of the system by opening a web browser, a music player, and a game. Even a game notorious for being able to run on a wide variety of devices like Doom was unable to get more than a single frame per second before crashing. Suffice it to say, Mac OS 9.2 on a Wii cannot run Doom and is unsuited for gaming in general.
However, this isn't the first time that Nintendo and Apple have been mentioned in the same breath. With recent updates to iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices, classic Nintendo controllers made for Nintendo Switch Online can now be used on modern Apple devices via Bluetooth or USB-C connections. Even though Dandumont's hacking showed where the Wii's hardware stood against an older Mac OS build, the fact that both Apple and Nintendo can be connected in different ways is both strange and fascinating.
Sources: Gizmodo, Le Journal du Lapin